What is the difference between Salesforce.com's External Objects and the SOAPBox? We have been getting a lot of questions regarding the difference between the SOAPBox connector and Salesforce.com' s new realtime data access dubbed 'External Objects' and thought a quick post would clarify the difference between the two technologies. The main difference between the two is that Salesforce.com's current release of this technology relies on a connection protocal called Odata. Odat

The Social Foundry was invited to the IIUG conference to speak about the RISE in APIs and the role it has on social, mobile, and the cloud. It was a fun talk with like minded individuals and the views about the impact of REST based web services was confirmed by a number of developers. In essense, the REST revolution will result in an explosion of interconnected devices given the number of devices now outpace people in world. As the barriers to integration fall away, people wi

What is a RESTful web service? Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style consisting of a coordinated set of constraints applied to components, connectors, and data elements, within a distributed hypermedia system to achieve desired architectural properties. Huh? Rather than get hung up on the technical definition, the best way to describe it (for me at least), is that a RESTful web service is the accessing a backend function using a standard URI (or U

Another successfull Dreamforce for the Social Foundry! After talking with folks at the show, it seems that integration is one of the most popular topics, but also the most difficult to solve. As predicted, most people we spoke to had their CRM and some other smaller apps on the cloud while the majority of their financial data is housed on-premise. This trend is going to continue until the Cloud can address issues of security and privacy (which the NSA's recent PRISM activitie

After a fruitful two days at API World in San Francisco a few thoughts come to mind as to the state of the API market in relation to the providers that were showcasing their technologies. The first is that the API Market has yet to be concretely defined. Each vendor is attempting to craft a vision of the API market that is most advantageous to the product they are selling. In the interest of full disclosure we. of course, did the same! It seems that APIs mean something differ